Summary Outline
Becoming ritually impure in Judaism has nothing to do with being
bad, being sinful, being evil-nothing at all to do with that. It is
simply a mechanical category that means you are ritually impure. It is
something that happens to everyone in the course of everyday life.
The Hebrew Bible also designates how to purify yourself if you become
ritually impure.
n this lecture, we continue our tour of the settlement at Qumran, looking
at some of its distinct features. Among the peculiarities of the settlement
at Qumran are the many animal bone deposits. An analysis of these
bones has indicated that all the animals represented are kosher species.
This is a phenomenon that is unique to Qrunran. Before we look at one
possible explanation for these animal bone deposits, we have to know a
little more about the group that lived at Qumran.
Scholarly consensus is that the community at Qumran was part of a larger
movement initially founded and led by dispossessed Zadokite priests.
Believing that the current priesthood in the Jerusalem temple was impure,
because the priests were usurpers, and that the sacrifices were polluted,
the Zadokite priests withdrew, forming an alternative community. Every full
member of this sect lived his everyday life as if he was a high priest officiating
in the Jerusalem temple, and apparently, partaking of communal meals was a
substitute for participation in the temple sacrifices. The bone deposits mirror
the designated areas outside of the temple compound in Jerusalem for the
disposal of sacred refuse from the sacrifices.
The priestly lifestyle of the occupants also explains the extensive system of
pools for storing water at Qumran. Evidence shows that a channel was built
to bring water from a nearby riverbed during the few flash floods that occur
in winter. Did the community at Qumran need to drink all the water it stored,
or were some of the pools used as Jewish ritual baths? Indeed, some of the
pools have steps. Not everybody needed to be ritually pure on an everyday
basis, only the priests. Ritual purity applies very specifically to entering the
presence of God. All Jews, no matter who they were, took it for granted that
they should ritually purify themselves before entering the Jerusalem temple,
before entering the presence of God. It is no surprise, then, that we find such
a large number of pools at Qumran.
On the plateau to. the east of the settlement is a large cemetery that consists of
1,100 graves. Only 46 of these graves have been excavated, but almost all of
those are graves of adult men. The three exceptions are adult women, no children
or infants at all. We have an admittedly small sample that nevertheless suggests
that the community at Qumran was one overwhelmingly of men, not an
ordinary community consisting of families.
This picture goes along with information that we have about this sect from
other sources, which we will talk about together with information from the
Dead Sea Scrolls in our next lecture.
Questions to Consider
1. What is the concept of Jewish ritual purity, and how is it reflected in the
archaeological remains at Qumran?
2. Did the Qumran community offer animal sacrifices?
Lecture 15-Transcript
The Sectarian Settlement at Qumran
In our last lecture, we started with an introduction to Qumran and the Dead
Sea scrolls by talking about the initial discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls
and the exploration of the site of Qumran and then looked at some of the
buildings that de Vaux uncovered in his excavations at Qumran including
the tower and the communal dining room and pantry with dishes, and the so-
called scriptoritum or writing room.
What I would like to do now is pick up where we left off continuing our
tour of the settlement at Qumran looking at some of its distinct buildings and
features. This will then lead us into a discussion of what the Dead Sea scrolls
are and how they relate to the settlement of Qtumran.
One of the peculiarities of the settlement at Qumran are animal bone deposits.
In open air spaces around the outsides of the buildings, de Vaux found
deposits of animal bones. We can see the animal bone deposits coming to
light in the excavations. Well, what exactly are these animal bone deposits?
An analysis of the animal bones indicated that all of the animals represented
in these deposits are kosher species of animals. That means species of animals
which it is permitted to eat according to biblical Jewish law. So, for example,
there are sheep, cow, goat. But, for example, no pork represented at Qumran.
There is no pig among the animal bone deposits. Very interesting, by the
way, there is also no poultry represented among the animal bone deposits,
even though, of course, poultry is permitted according to Jewish law.
An analysis of these animal bone deposits indicated that these animals
had been slaughtered, butchered. The meat had been cut into chunks. The
chunks of meat had been boiled or roasted. The meat had been eaten off of
the bones. Then the bones were placed on top of the ground in the open air
spaces around the outsides of the buildings and either placed inside pots or
covered with pieces of broken pottery.
How do we explain this phenomenon? We do not have any other
archaeological site where similar deposits of animal bones have been found.
This is a phenomenon that is unique to Qumran. I believe that there are two
reasonable possible explanations for the animal bone deposits which means
that there are other explanations that are not reasonable.
What would these be? Well, one possibility is that what we have represented
here are the remains of animal sacrifices. Apparently these are not the
remains of animal sacrifices. Why are they not? We have no indication from
the literature of this sect, the sect that lived at Qumran, that they rejected
the basic biblical principle that you can only offer animal sacrifices in
the Jerusalem temple and that they would have or did animal sacrifices
somewhere else. We have no evidence that they sacrificed animals outside
the Jerusalem temple even though, as we will see, they themselves did not
participate in the sacrifices offered in the Jerusalem temple.
Also, we have no evidence, no physical remains of an altar for animal
sacrifices at Qumran. If they are not the remains of animal sacrifices, what
are they? De Vaux suggested that these were the remains of special ritual
meals that were eaten by the community. I think that de Vaux’s explanation
is correct, but it lacks explanatory power. That is, even if de Vaux is right,
that these are the remains of special ritual meals that were eaten by the
community, it does not explain why they deposited the bones in this very
peculiar manner.
So what is the explanation for this? Now I am going to tell what I think is the
reason for the animal bone deposits, but in order to get to that, I now have to
tell you a little bit about the group that lived at Qumran.
The community that lived at Qumran was part of a Jewish sect that was
originally established by, that is originally founded by, and at least initially
led by dispossessed Zadokite priests. Remember that the Zadokites were
a high priestly family that had controlled the priesthood in the Jerusalem
temple until the first half of the 2nd century B.C. when the priesthood was
taken over by other priestly families that were not Zadokites.
When that event occurred, some members of this family established the sect
that later settled at Qumran, at least some of which settled at Qumran. There
were members that lived in other places too aside from Qumran. So what we
have here are members of a larger movement that initially is founded by and
at least initially led by dispossessed Zadokite priests.
This group believed that the current priesthood in the Jerusalem temple
was unfit to serve and was impure because they were usurpers, and that by
way of extension, the sacrifices offered in the temple and the temple itself
were polluted. They therefore refused to participate in the sacrifices offered
in the temple, withdrew, forming themselves, that is their community as a
substitute temple.
Every full member of this sect lived his everyday life as if he was a high
priest officiating in the Jerusalem temple. It was a priestly community,
that is, a community living a priestly lifestyle but without a temple. In the
interim, until they regained control of the Jerusalem temple, they apparently
considered participation in their communal meals to be a substitute for
participation in the temple sacrifices.
Everything I have just told you is not my original scholarship. This is
generally what scholars believe about the sect that lived at Qumran. How
does this then relate to the animal bones that we have at Qumran? Well, let
us think for a minute when we talk about animal sacrifices in the Jerusalem
temple or in any ancient temple for that matter. What went on? Generally
speaking, what happens is you have a lot of animals being brought up, the
animals are being slaughtered, butchered. The meat is being cut into chunks.
Depending on the type of sacrifice, either all of the animal is burned on the
altar, that is all of the animal is offered to god, for example, a Holocaust
offering, or in some cases, parts of the animal are burned on the altar offered
to god, and the rest of the meat is cooked an eaten by the priest and the people.
When we imagine this gigantic esplanade, this gigantic plaza with the temple
building in the middle of it-by the way, other ancient temples around the
Mediterranean world in the Near East-what we have to imagine is a lot of
banqueting going on. People are eating the animals that were being offered
for sacrifice. They are cooking the meat and they are consuming the meat on
the spot. The meat, by the way, was cooked and eaten on the spot because in
antiquity, once an animal was slaughtered, there was no way of preserving it.
So you cooked the meat and you at it on the spot. When we think about this
big temple esplanade, we have to imagine a lot of people up there and what
are they doing? They are eating meat.
You have had your sacrificial portion of meat, you participated in the
sacrifice, you got your meat, you ate it. What do you do with the parts that
you cannot eat? The bones, the gristle, all that stuff] what do you do with
it? You cannot just take it home and toss it out with the rest of the kitchen
garbage. It is part of a sacrifice, but it has to be disposed 011 it is refuse.
Well, apparently, there were around the outside of the temple compound in
Jerusalem, specially designated areas for the disposal of sacred refuse from
the sacrifices.
Let us zip back to Qumran. Here we have a community which is living as if
it is a substitute temple with every full member living his everyday life as if
he is a priest officiating in the temple and participation in their communal
meals being considered a substitute for participation in the temple sacrifices.
What I think is going on at Qumran is that even though technically these are
not sacrifices, in terms of the idea of what is going on, it is something very
similar. They are then disposing of the remains of the animals consumed
at these meals in a manner analogous to the way the meat consumed in the
Jerusalem temple was disposed of afterwards.
I think de Vaux was right, these are the remains of special ritual meals, but
I also think there is a very specific reason for why the animal bones were
deposited in this manner and which explains why we do not have analogous
deposits at other archaeological sites.
One of the workshops that dots the settlement at Qumran happens to be a
potter’s workshop which has a couple of kilns for firing pottery in it. It is
very interesting that we have a potter’s workshop at Qumran. Why is this
interesting? First of all, it explains why we have certain types of pottery
that are found basically at Qumran but nowhere else. One of the things that
archaeologists do when we study pottery from any given archaeological
excavation is to see where else has pottery like this been found.
One of the very interesting things about Qumran is that there are certain
types of pottery that are very distinctive to Qumran and that are basically
found nowhere else. One of these distinctive types of pottery are the tall
cylindrical jars covered with bowl shaped lids that were found in the caves
with the scrolls, in Cave 1, and are found in other caves with scrolls and
other caves around Qumran in general and inside the settlement itself. Why
are they distinctive to Qumran? They are because apparently they were being
manufactured there.
Another interesting thing about having a potter’s workshop at Qumran is that
it is not really an intuitive place to have a potter’s workshop, that is you
have a problem with fuel. Where are you going to get all of your fuel from
in order to light the fires that you need to burn the pottery in the kilns, to tire
the pottery in the kilns. It is not really a logical place to establish a potter’s
workshop. So the existence of a potter’s workshop at Qumran, well, there has
to be a specific reason for it. The reason for it apparently is connected with
this group’s observance of the Laws of Purity, the biblical Laws of Purity
which we are going to discuss.
These Laws of Purity actually come up right away when we talk about
the water system at Qumran. There is a very extensive system of pools for
storing water that runs through the settlement. The water system at Qumran
has been the subject of a lot of controversy. The reason is Qumran is located
in the desert. There is very little rainfall; there are no freshwater springs
immediately in the vicinity. If you want to live at Qumran year-round, you
are going to have to store enough water for the purposes of survival.
The question is: Did the community at Qumran need so much water as was
stored in all of the pools or could it be that some of the pools were used for
another purpose? Specifically, could it be that some of the pools were used
as Jewish ritual baths, what is called in Hebrew, a miqvah, plural, miqvaot.
I agree with Roniricht who is an expert on ancient ritual baths that ten of the
pools at Qumran should be identified as ritual baths, as miqvaot. Here is the
question: How do we identify a pool as a ritual bath versus a pool that is used
for storing drinking water, that is, a cistern? How do you tell the difference?
Well, the major feature that identifies some of the pools at Qumran as ritual
baths are the broad sets of steps that go from the top to the bottom.
Why does this identify a pool as a ritual bath? It does because if you are
in the desert and your main concern is with storing drinking water for the
purposes of survival, you are not going to take up valuable volume in the
pool with these broad sets of steps which also, by the way, take more effort
to cut. You are not going to take up that valuable volume. You are only going
to have broad sets of steps going from the top to the bottom, it; what, if you
need the steps to go up and down, in and out of the pool. If you are going
up and down the steps in and out of the pool, then by definition you are
immersing yourself in the water which means it is a ritual bath.
Furthermore, some of the pools at Qumran, some of these ritual baths, have
other features that make no sense in a cistern. For example, some of the pools
have low partitions running down the steps. These low partitions make no
sense in a cistern but make good sense in a miqvah, in a ritual bath. The idea
being that the bather went down one side of the partition impure, immersed
himself in the water, and came back up on the other side, purified. I have just
referred to what is probably the central governing principle of the community
that lived at Qumran, and that is the principle of Jewish ritual purity.
This is a principle which is poorly understood by most Westerners, at least
today, including most Jews today. Let us take a minute now to talk about
this idea of Jewish ritual purity which is so central to the lifestyle of this
community. What is this all about? The Hebrew bible designates certain
things and certain natural processes as causing ritual impurity.
I use the word “things” deliberately because the things that cause ritual
impurity as designated by the Hebrew bible today appear to us to be quite
random. They range from things like touching mildew on the walls of a house
to touching a lizard to touching a corpse. And certain natural processes cause
impurity, for example, for a man having a nocturnal emission or for a woman
having her menstrual period.
These things cause a person to be ritually impure. Becoming ritually impure
in Judaism has nothing to do with being bad, being sinful, being evil, nothing
at all to do with that. It is simply a mechanical category that means you are
ritually impure. It is something that happens to everyone in the course of
everyday life. These things are absolutely unavoidable.
The Hebrew bible also designates how to purify yourself if you become
ritually impure. The way to purify yourself actually varies depending on who
you are, for example, priest versus layperson, and what kind of impurity you
incurred, for example, some kinds of impurity are worse than others.
The worst of all is corpse impurity which involves a very long and
complicated process of purification afterwards. Remember that story of
the good Samaritan and the priest and the Levite who detour around what
appears to be a dead body, because afterwards to purify yourself from corpse
impurity, it is a very, very complicated process. Of course, as a priest and a
Levite, you would have to be especially concerned about that.
The way to purify yourself depends on who you are and what kind of impurity
you’ve incurred. For most kinds of ritual impurity and for most people, the
way to purify yourself is to immerse yourself in a pool of undrawn water
and wait for the passage of a certain amount of time. What does it mean a
pool of undrawn water? It means water that has been put into a pool not by
mechanical means but naturally. So, for example, springs, streams, rivers,
the Jordan River, lakes, a pool of water left standing after a heavy rainfall, all
of those can be used for the purposes of ritual immersion.
When it says the pool cannot have been filled mechanically it means that you
cannot take a pool and fill it with a hose or take buckets of water and empty
the buckets into the pool. You cannot do that. You can dig a pool and you can
then dig a channel and allow water to flow naturally through the channel into
the pool, but you cannot fill that pool through mechanical means.
I would like to say God did not make things easy on the Jewish people. Look
at where we are. We are not in North Carolina here, my home state, nice and
green, lots of water. We are in the middle of the Middle East here, it is the
desert. So if you are observing the laws of Jewish ritual purity on a regular
basis, you are going to have to provide for pools for the purposes of ritual
immersion. That is exactly what we see here at Qumran.
At this point, I can just imagine what many of you must be thinking. Oy vey,
what a pain to be a Jew, every time I touch one of these random things or
have one of these unavoidable natural processes, I become ritually impure
and have to run off and dunk myself in a pool of undrawn water. Actually,
that is not the way it works.
You see, it was not necessary for most Jews to be ritually pure on an everyday
basis. In fact, most Jews were not ritually pure on an everyday basis. This
notion of ritual purity applies very specifically to coming into contact with a
divine presence. That is, it was necessary to be in a state of ritual purity when
you entered the presence of God. Otherwise, for most Jews on an ordinary
basis, it was not necessary to be in a state of ritual purity all the time.
What was the focal point for coming into contact with a divine presence
in early Judaism? That was the Jerusalem temple. All Jews, no matter who
they were, and including, by the way, Jesus and Paul, took it for granted that
you ritually purified yourself before entering the Jerusalem temple, before
entering the presence of God.
Again, for most Jews, otherwise on an everyday basis, if you are not going
in and out of the temple, you do not have to be ritually pure except for one
category of ancient Jews who did have to worry about maintaining a higher
degree of ritual purity on an everyday basis. Who would that be? Of course,
that was the priest.
Now zip back to Qumran. Here we are looking at a settlement that was
inhabited by a community living a priestly lifestyle. The community literally
conceived itself as a substitute temple with every full member living his
everyday life as if he is a priest officiating in the temple. Is it any surprise
then that we have such a large number of ritual baths and large sizes of ritual
baths to accommodate the members of this community over the course of
a year? Is it any surprise then? No, it’s not a surprise. This is as clear an
expression as you can get of this group’s concern with the maintenance of a
high level of Jewish ritual purity.
Another interesting thing that we can see in this particular ritual bath, this
particular pool, is that there is a crack running down the middle of the steps.
In fact, the steps are split and one side of the steps literally dropped. Here
we see more evidence for the earthquake of 31. When the earthquake hit, the
steps of this pool literally split down the middle and one side dropped.
I know what else you must be wondering. Well, she just said that We are in
the middle of the desert, there is very little rainfall, there is no fresh Water
springs in the area. Where did they get all the water from to fill these pools?
What the community at Qumran did was to build a water system to bring
water from a nearby riverbed.
The site of Qumran sits on a terrace, an actual terrace overlooking a riverbed.
This riverbed is called Wadi Qumran. Wadi is Arabic for riverbed. Now like
99.9 percent of the riverbeds along the shore of the Dead Sea, Wadi Qumran
is a dry river bed. That is, most of the time it has no water flowing in it.
But on very rare occasions, in the winter, maybe once or twice a year in the
winter, if you have enough rain falling, not at Qumran but in the mountains
behind Qumran, what happens, the ground becomes saturated with water and
the water begins to concentrate and flow in these dry river beds down to the
Dead Sea in the form of flash floods.
What the community at Qumran did was to take advantage of this natural
principle and they built an aqueduct, a water channel going from the
settlement back to Wadi Qumran to bring the water in times of flash Hoods.
We are going to take a look at this Water system but before I go on, let me
point out another very interesting thing.
As I just said, you usually have flash floods very rarely in the winter and
only in the winter because it does not rain otherwise. So you might have one
or two flash floods a year, which means that the pools at Qumran were filled
and replenished only maybe once or twice a year. The rest of the time, that
was it. That was the water that you had. So over the course of the life of this
community, people repeatedly immersed themselves in those ritual baths.
What I am trying to point out here is that the concept of Jewish ritual purity
has nothing to do with hygiene and cleanliness in the modern sense of the
word. The water could be dirty, but if it was a ritual bath, it was considered
pure enough to immerse yourself in. In fact, I believe that probably
this practice spread disease if anything, rather than preventing disease
and sickness.
Today, when you go to Qumran, you can actually follow the line of the
aqueduct back to where it starts in Wadi Qumran. By aqueduct, I do not mean
the Pont du Gard, it is not one of these aqueducts, Roman style aqueducts on
arches or something like that. What you have is a relatively modest channel
dug into the ground to bring water to the settlement from the riverbed. You
can follow the line of this channel back to where it starts. This idea of Hash
Hoods is somewhat alien to most people living in North America today,
unless maybe you live in the American Southwest.
I have a couple of pictures showing what Hash floods actually look like that
I took. I happened to be in Israel in the winter of 2005. It is very dramatic
because you can see huge amounts of waters flowing through these riverbeds,
and what is very interesting is that it is not raining along the shore of the
Dead Sea. It is raining back in the mountains on the way to Jerusalem. But
so much rain has fallen that the water has concentrated in these ordinarily
dry river beds and is flowing down to the Dead Sea in the form of Hash
Hoods with a particularly dramatic example of a HashHood flowing over the
highway just south of Ein Gedi here at Nahal Arugot.
Today when you visit Qumran, you can actually walk back along the line of
the aqueduct, the line of the water channel, and I always take people to do
this when I am at Qumran because it is a fun thing to do. As you follow the
line of the channel, you reach a point where there is a solid cliff and then a
tunnel cut into the cliH2 because at this point they reach the cliff and in order
to continue the line of the channel, the line of the aqueduct, they have to cut
through the rock of the cliff. You can crawl through this channel on your
hands and knees. I always make people do this because it is kind of fun.
When you emerge from the other side of the tunnel, you find that you are still
following the line of the aqueduct, and at the moment when you emerge from
this tunnel and you look straight ahead of you, what you see is a waterfall
which, again, ordinarily is a dry waterfall, but in times of HashHood would
have water flowing through it.
What they did was to build a dam at the base of the waterfall, and in the time
of a Hash Hood, then the water would rise up behind the dam and would begin
to How into the channel. The water then would How out to the settlement. We
can see the channel as it comes from the area of Wadi Qumran and the cliffs
behind the site out to Qumran, and the channel then Hows into the settlement,
goes into the settlement and connects all of the pools in the settlement one
after another. You only needed one flash flood to fill up all of the pools in the
settlement, which is a good thing because in any given year you might only
have one or two flash Hoods.
On the plateau to the east of the settlement is a large cemetery that consists
of approximately 1,100 graves. We are standing on top of the tower, looking
east we see the area where the plateau is located, if we walk up to the top of
the plateau, we can see it here. We can actually walk up and see, here is a sign
that says “cemetery” and some of the excavated graves. De Vaux excavated
a relatively small number of graves in this cemetery, 46 of the graves out of
approximately 1,100, and found a couple of very interesting things.
Most of the graves in the cemetery are located on the plateau immediately
to the east of the settlement with scattered graves then located on the hills to
the north, the east, and the south. In the main part of the cemetery and on the
hills to the north and the east, all of the graves are lined up in neat rows, and
all of the bodies are oriented, laid with the same orientation, with the feet
facing north and the head facing south. In the southern part of the cemetery
though, and to the south of Wadi Qumran, the graves are more randomly
oriented with many of them oriented east/west.
All of these graves are what we call, in archaeological terms, individual
inhumations. What does that mean‘? That simply means that they buried the
whole body. They did not cremate it. They buried the bodies in a manner that
is very similar to the way we bury our bodies today in the sense that they dug
a trench in the ground six feet deep, took the body, wrapped it in a shroud,
maybe placed it in a wooden coffin, put it at the base of the trench, sealed
that off with mud, bricks, or stones, filled the trench in back with dirt, and
then erected a headstone to mark the site of the grave. At Qumran actually, in
addition, they actually put a stone by the feet and piled some stones one top
of the grave.
So the graves are actually similar to the way that we bury our dead today. In
addition to the fact that many of the graves seem to be oriented in a particular
way with this north/south orientation, de Vaux found that in the main part of
the cemetery and in the hills to the north and the east where the graves are
all oriented north/south, the feet facing north, that in the main part of the
cemetery, all but three of the excavated burials consisted of adult men. The
three exceptions were adult women, no children or infants at all. Whereas,
in the southern part of the cemetery where the graves are more randomly
oriented, there were large numbers of women and children.
What we know now but de Vaux did not know at his time is that those burials
to the south with the large numbers of women and children in the random
orientation, those are relatively recent, i.e. modern Bedouin burials that have
nothing to do with the settlement at Qumran. If we exclude them from our
picture, as we should, we are left with an admittedly small excavated sample
but a very interesting sample which suggests that the community at Qumran
consisted overwhelmingly of adult men, and that this therefore was not an
ordinary community consisting of families.
This picture goes along with information that we have about this sect from
other sources which we will talk about together with the information from
the Dead Sea scrolls in our next lecture.
